


The Shape of Everything

by goldfinch



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Animal Death, F/M, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-03 04:56:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1731989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes they have a crew but mostly it’s just the two of them, the eyes and the ears, the head and the hands, one heart between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shape of Everything

They grow up fast in foster care. Have to, because it turns out most of the world is as much a pile of shit as the house they grew up in, which isn’t really any kind of surprise. They eat fast and run away and watch each other’s backs, and grow up shuffling from foster family to group home to foster family, the roar of fire in their ears.

There’s not much to do in Kansas, or in the three-church one-grocery town they end up in, except drink and shoot. But no one will sell a couple of obviously twelve year olds alcohol - they’re in that glassy two week period where they’re both the same age - so they shoot. They borrow their foster father’s BB gun and then, when they don’t get caught, his long hunting rifle.

Their range is just a fence outside town, a run-down fragment that runs along the edge of the road for a while and then runs out. There’s grass in every direction, sweet gold that catches the glint of metal on the fence, of the rifle in Richie’s hands and then Seth’s. Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew; Coca-Cola, Sprite. Seth’s the better shot.

They stay out until the sun gets low, and then walk back into town, Seth with the rifle slung across his shoulders, Richie’s hands going as he talks about this book he’s been reading. It’s warm out but it isn’t hot; cars drift to the other side of the road as they pass. They’re hungry, because they haven’t eaten since breakfast, but they’re happy too.

They’re out there more and more as the summer wears on, and before long Richie’s almost as good as him, and Seth is even better. The rifle’s too long, though. Seth’s used to the feel of their father’s pistol, the clean slide of it as he snaps it together. He gets used to the rifle but he likes it less. Richie doesn’t like it either, but only because it’s hard to get it in and out of the house without being seen.

By the time school starts in September, they’re down to shooting at tufts of grass because they’ve used up all the cans. Every so often a group of local kids rides by on their bikes, four boys on shitty old racing models. There’s a movie theater in the next town over, which is probably where they’re going, but as they pass they all turn to look at the Seth and Richie. One of them has a nose that looks like it’s been broken, and there’s a cool, flat look in his eyes, like a wolf through the trees. Seth doesn’t know any of them, but the hair on the back of his neck pricks up in a chilly wash of danger.

“Watch those ones,” Richie says. They wait until the boys are a ways down the road before they turn back toward the fence. Eyes find eyes. They know they’re being watched.

They see them again a few days later, and then again a week or so after that, always on their bikes, always going somewhere else. They never stop, though, and they never stop watching, and it makes Seth crazy. He sees one of them at school, the boy who’s always in the back, but never any of the others.

Maybe it’s because they didn’t grow up in this school district, because they’re orphans, because Richie shows everyone up in class, always, and gives zero fucks about what even the teachers think of him. Maybe because Seth and him have a running wager about who can kiss the most girls, and right now they’re tied for six. Either way, when the boys stop one afternoon in the middle of the street, Seth knows it’s trouble.

“Strap in, brother,” Richie says, voice pitched low.

The kids drop their bikes in the grass, coming toward them in a way that Seth will keep recognizing years later. They're confident, they're moving slow and easy; the one with the broken-looking nose stops in front of Richie, who's closer.

"What're you guys doing out here all the time?" he asks. "Besides missing your target?"

"Hey," Seth says. "Guys. Come on."

“Fuck off,” Richie spits. He’s not holding the knife anymore, but it’s lying unsheathed on the fence, and Seth thinks at him, Grab it, grab it, you idiot. The gun’s thrown down in the rumpled grass about a yard away; Seth looks at it, then back toward the boys. He thinks: Don’t ever point a gun at something you aren’t willing to kill.

The boy smirks. “Make me."

So Richie does.

He doesn’t even go for the knife, just for the kid’s face, a quick one-two punch like something out of a Jackie Chan movie, except then he just throws his weight forward. They go to the ground, but the boy has at least fifteen pounds and a year on Richie, and he ends up on top, one fist flying out. Seth hears Richie’s glasses snap.

The gun is in his hands.

He steps forward and swings it around like a baseball bat, hard, missing the kid’s head but catching him in the meaty part of his shoulder. It’s enough. He falls to the side with a high puppyish yelp, then rolls over onto his back, but by that time Seth’s slapped the barrel of the gun into his other palm.

A flinty wind comes up over the fields, scraping the grass low. There’s a smell in the air he doesn’t care for, like burning. He racks a load into the rifle.

“Put another finger on my brother, and your friends are gonna be picking pieces of you out of their hair for a week.”

He’s seen the movies; he’s read the comics. He knows what happens next. The kid goes white, nods, scrambles away and stumbles climbing on his bike, and as the kids ride off Seth stretches a hand out toward Richie, grinning.

“How’dja like them apples?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

They get their first job because they’re young, because if they’re caught they’ll only go to juvie. It’s a small thing. Drug delivery. They’re just unloading boxes but it goes bad out of fucking nowhere, gunshots and one guy bleeding on the floor and Richie turns around just in time to miss the bullet that snaps past his head.

They’re on opposite sides of the room at the time, but their eyes come together like magnetic poles, and then they’re both running. Seth scrambles over the boxes, knocking packages of cocaine or maybe meth to the floor in spectacular white sprays as he gets behind the truck, toward the back door they came in through. He doesn’t know where Richie is and his heart’s doing a panicked double-time in his chest, but he runs, and he doesn’t listen to the gunfire, and he trusts his brother. When he gets to the back door, Richie’s already there, holding it open and bolting it after them. Seth has time for a brief thought for all the people they’re locking in, doing that, and then some guy’s rounding the corner with a gun in his hand, and it’s no one they know.

It takes them twenty minutes to get far enough away that they both feel safe enough to stop, and then Seth just puts his back to a McDonald’s, next to the cooling vent, next to Richie, and breathes. His heart still feels like it’s going to burst out of his chest onto the street, but it’s calming. He is calming. Seth looks at his brother the same time Richie looks at him.

Richie’s mouth twists, then opens for another gasp of air. “So I don’t really like almost dying,” he says.

Seth nods. “Yeah. Let’s never do that again.”

They find out later that it was a rival group, that there had been a turf war going on and no one said anything. Two people die, and one won’t ever come out of the hospital. It’s the last time they go into anything so unprepared.

 

 

 

 

 

It turns out Richie is good with knives. Like, scary good. Seth can shoot a bullseye at fifty yards, but Richie can hit one with a knife at twenty-five feet, a trick that’s a hell of a lot easier to pull at bars to make people buy them drinks, even though they’re underage. They practice a lot. Summer days in the backyard, all the days their fifth foster parents are out or watching tv in the front room, winter days in the side yard, out of the raw Kansas wind and the worst of the snow.

They’re fourteen and on their seventh foster parents - Martin and Louise, but all Seth will remember later is that they have a Rottweiler that once nearly bites Richie’s fingers off, and then pretty soon after that they don’t have a Rottweiler anymore - when Seth first expresses interest in screwing a girl. A particular girl, anyway. They’ve been looking at dirty magazines since they were twelve, but that’s something else entirely, and Seth knows Richie wouldn’t get so pissy about some skirt in a magazine neither of them knew and Seth wouldn’t have a chance in hell with anyway. Because it turns out Richie’s been looking at her too, at this girl from school, long brown hair and no makeup, rainbow bracelets up her arm to her elbow.

“I’ll toss you for it,” Richie says thoughtfully. They’re out in the backyard, a clear blue sky overhead. At first Seth thinks he means a coin toss, but Richie’s hefting a knife in one hand, eyeing the target at the end of the fence. His mouth curls up. “Whoever gets a bullseye gets to screw her.”

Seth grins. “You’re on.”

Richie wins - he almost always wins at knives - but she won’t sleep with either of them anyway, so it’s almost alright. They keep going to school, and Richie picks up books from the library in his spare time, and they watch too many movies now that they’re actually allowed to. They hit up a couple of liquor stores. Seth buys a real gun from a guy who knows he’s not of age, and Seth takes up lock-picking and crossword puzzles and drops the books.

They fall in with the group in KC just after Seth turns nineteen. The guy who organizes shit, his name is Raul. He was born in California but his vowels have soft, rounded edges from his years with one of the Mexican cartels. He’s still with them, but he runs his own shit now, heists and bank jobs and jacked shipping containers, brews moonshine in his basement but it’s good stuff, blood orange and blackberry and elderberry-flavored.

Raul makes them Lengua and black beans in the kitchen of one of his suburban houses and tells them about the operation. How it works. What their cut will be. It’s more than anything they’ve had before unless they were working by themselves, and Richie convinced him that it’s better to work with people anyway, to have backup, support, someone to scout the area. They’ll be able to do more jobs quicker.

Raul scrapes Lengua onto their plates, and then his own. It looks alright, but Seth knows what it is. He eats the beans instead. “Understand something,” Raul says. His eyes are light and there’s a curved shine of alcohol on his lips. “You’re young, too young maybe, but I’ve heard really good things about the two of you. You in particular.” He tilts his head toward Richie. “So I’m taking a chance. But there’s something you have to remember, boys, come here, let me tell you.” He leans forward then, tongue sweeping across his lips. Something inside Seth shudders and arches its back. They’re in Raul’s house, eating his food; he told them the best way to eat a prickly pear cactus, but he ran with a Mexican cartel for thirteen years, and he has killed more people than Seth has ever called friend.

But all Raul says is, “Do the jobs right, and I’ll make you a couple of very rich men.” He laughs. "Ah man, your faces." And then he pours them another finger of moonshine.

Seth can live with that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They live mostly in the South, after that. Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, where the desert is a dusty wasteland to the horizon and Richie won’t go out without shoes, because the earth burns his feet. Seth needles him until he does it anyway. That night they watch movies with their feet crossed in pans of cold water, and Seth cleans his gun on the lap desk they found in the closet when they moved in. They’ve been working with Raul for three years at that point, and they’ve just been promoted.

“So,” Richie says. “Banks.”

“Yep.”

Richie tilts his head a little. He’s slumped all the way down in his armchair, the only way he sits except completely straight. “You don’t think it’s too much of a cliche?”

On the couch, Seth gives a short huff of laughter. “That’s what you’re worried about?” He snaps the last piece of his gun into place, looks down the sights at Clint Eastwood’s face on the television. His character is wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a revolver. “I think we can be whatever we want to be. But you’ll have all the puzzles you can stand this way, and being bank robbers appeals to my sense of the dramatic.”

Richie tilts his head to the side, staring out the sliding glass door. Their yard is nothing but dead grass, a high wooden fence and beyond it, desert. They’re at the edge of a brand new development site that never took off; more than half the houses around them are empty, which suits Seth just fine. There’s something too thoughtful in Richie’s face, though.

“What?” Seth asks, suddenly worried.

“It’s just… do you think we should dress up?”

Seth shrugs. “We’ve got suits in the closet. We could be like, the Blues Brothers.”

Richie brightens. “I totally call Elwood.”

It’s actually not always banks, but it’s always safes, because Richie’s the best box-man in the business. The guys in Kansas City know it, Seth knows it - Richie knows it too. He gets so smug after a good run that he’s nearly unmanageable, but Seth likes him best like that, riding his own high, matching each other in celebratory shots at the bar. But he likes the preparation too. The sense of control, the perfect balance of anticipation and focus. It only takes a second really, like slipping into a nice jacket, a quick glance over at Richie, a quick nod, one hand reaching into his jacket.

“Got your balls on?” Seth asks.

“Screwed on tight.”

He chambers a round, sets his shoulder against the hotel room’s or the bank lobby’s or the house’s rear door. “Then let’s do this, brother.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her name is Vanessa. Seth meets her during a job in Ohio, in another hotel; Richie’s the box-man, Seth’s the gun man, she’s their backup, which they need because there is a security room for each wing. She takes Seth’s arm, purrs, “Follow me, darlin’,” as they cross the lobby. His and Richie’s eyes meet over the neat slope of her shoulders, and Richie shrugs.

It’s only later, at a bar three towns over with the watches they stole riding away in the back of some guy of Raul’s truck - quick and clean, the whole thing, like Uncle Rick used to teach them to do it - that Richie gets to talk to her. She’s from Kansas City, born and raised, and although she’s trained some of the accent out of her voice he can still hear it, and it sounds like home. She orders Johnny Walker Blue to start but after that it’s nothing but Jack Daniels, straight. By now Seth’s picked up a taste for Tequila, same as Richie, and when he orders she can’t stop herself laughing. It’s nice laugh, rough and high.

The sex is even better.

He sees her again two weeks later, just for drinks. They don’t sleep together that time, but spend a couple hours regaling each other with tales of thefts they’ve pulled off. She is new, an unknown, entirely uncharted territory. He thinks he likes that.

It’s easier to meet up with her once he and Richie move back to Kansas City, into a sprawling house on the edge of town that is far too big for just the two of them. Seth doesn’t mind. He likes having space. They never did have it growing up, with their father or sharing rooms and living on top of other foster kids when they were a little older. Richie spends afternoons in the backyard, in a lawn chair, under an old oak tree with spreading branches. Seth sometimes comes out to visit him, bringing peanut butter sandwiches or a couple beers, and they sit out there together and soak up the sun.

“We should put in a pool or something,” he says one afternoon, reading about a new outlet mall opening up on the other side of town. They’re set to do a job tonight in Jefferson City, and he needs to pick up his favorite shirt from the dry-cleaners, but he doesn’t want to just yet.

Richie’s reading a stapled print out; Seth catches a glimpse of gears and wheels when he turns a page. “You can’t even swim.”

“I can too.”

“Yeah, barely. Remember that time in El Paso?”

Seth winces. “Come on, I’d just had, like, six burritos.”

“Whatever.” Richie puts down his magazine, lets his glasses slip a little. “But hey, what’s the deal with Jessica Rabbit?”

“What? I thought you liked her.”

“Yeah well I didn’t know she was sticking around, did I?”

Seth shrugs. There’s a long pause, and then he cuts his eyes at Richard. “Book or cartoon?”

Richie gives him a dirty look. “Book, Seth, duh.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things go bad for them in Phoenix. It doesn’t seem like it at first; at first things are smooth, easy, same as always. Take out the cameras, silence dissidents, take out cell phones. As Seth’s turning toward the safe, Richie slides up behind him.

“We’ve got a problem,” he whispers, close enough Seth can feel his breath hot in his ear.

“Mm?”

“The guy on the right, in the green shirt. He’s a cop.”

“You’re fucking shitting me.”

“I saw the badge when he took out his cell phone. He tried to hide it.”

“Is he carrying?”

“I don’t know, Seth, why don’t you go ask?”

He’s carrying. Later, with the guy’s pistol shoved into the side of his head, watching some dude who is apparently the cop’s also-off-duty partner draw a very nice service revolver on his brother’s chest, Seth swears and curses their surveillance team and flexes his fingers uselessly against the grip of his gun. He could punch this guy in the face. He could shoot the one with a gun on Richie, even as close as they’re standing. He could. He’s a fucking great shot.

Richie looks at him, doesn’t blink. “It’s like that movie,” he says. Seth blinks at him. What the fuck? “You know,” Richie says, too slowly, too forcefully, and makes some vague gesture with his free hand. “The Barry Levinson one."

And then it clicks. Seth nods. “Yeah, yeah exactly. I can totally get him from here.”

“No you can’t, because your aim’s shit,” Richie snaps, mouth twisting.

“Yeah like yours is any better. Maybe if you took your eyes off my _fiancé_ for two seconds -“

“What, you think I want to fuck her? Seth, you couldn’t pay me to do her, okay? Jesus. It’d been like fucking a god damn cat - and not in a good way.”

“Then why the hell are you -“

“Because she’s going to fuck things up for us! I know she is, I can feel it. All you have to do is look at her.” Which could be a backhanded compliment, about her looks, about how she moves in a good dress, but Seth doesn’t think it is. The thing about these fights is that they’re never wholly untrue, and Richie’s been itching to tear Vanessa down since the second Seth put a ring on her finger.

When Richie finally gets his hands around his throat, Seth gives up too quickly; Richie has to elbow him in the stomach to keep him fighting, easing off until Seth lies still, and closes his eyes. He listens to Richie lurch up, the quick bang bang of his pistol and the sharp gurgle as he gets a knife against someone’s throat. People are screaming, a long cacophony of women’s voices. Seth opens his eyes.

“Anyone dead?” he asks.

“Nope,” Richie says. The cop in the green shirt is lying on the ground, with a bloodied knee and his gun pressed under Richie’s heel, but yeah, definitely alive. “Come on, cops are gonna be here soon.”

Seth pushes himself up, rubs at his neck. It’s probably going to bruise tomorrow. He’s going to have to have a talk with Richie about that. “Other than the ones that are already here, you mean? Jesus, I’m gonna fucking skewer Raul for this. What’s the point of surveillance if we don’t know this is the cops’ favorite bank?”

Richie's mouth turns down. “Get in line.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

He and Vanessa are married for all of two months. He moves into her apartment, brings his clothes and his computer and his weapons and all his shit, but Richie comes over for dinner once a week, wearing a suit sans tie like he’s on a job. It pisses her off a little, Seth knows, but she handles it well enough. Tries to talk to Richie about whatever and puts way more effort into the food than she should. The dessert is an elaborate cake, with a honey and almond crust and cream cheese filling, and ice-cream on the side. Vanessa comes back from the kitchen with a knife to start serving. She hands a piece to Richie, who shakes his head.

“I don’t want any.”

She blinks at him. “Sorry, what?” It’s probably supposed to be light, even a joke, but there’s a hard edge to it she probably just couldn’t scratch off. Richie’s been needling her all night. Little stuff mostly, about a mistake she made on their last job and her shoes and name-dropping a long chain of Seth’s previous girlfriends and hookups. “Why the hell not?”

When Richie speaks his voice is flat, calm with a little scorn. It’s his talking-to-idiots voice. “Because,” Richie says, “I’m fucking allergic to almonds.”

“Richie, come on.” Seth says, when Vanessa’s gone to put the extra plate away. “She’s trying.”

“Good for her.”

“You aren’t allergic to ice cream, are you?” Vanessa calls from the kitchen, her voice strident, Kentucky breaking through.

“No,” Richie calls back.

Seth sighs, drops a hand over his face. Vanessa’s doing something at the counter, now; she’s in a short black dress and seamed stockings and if he leans over he can almost see the fold of skin where her ass meets her legs. They’ve been fighting a lot lately, pretty much since they got back from their honeymoon in Florida, about their future and him and Richie, but damn does she look good in a dress. “This isn’t going to work, is it?” he says, looking back at his brother.

Richie shakes his head, but his eyes stay on Seth. “No.” His voice is firm. “It’s not.”

He gives it another week, but she picks up on his change of heart, and it’s more nit-picking and more fights and next Sunday, when Richie comes by, it’s to help Seth pack up his things.

“You okay?” Richie asks. He has the last of the boxes balanced on his shoulder, and Seth reaches to throw it into the back of the car. His stuff fits into four boxes, which all fit into the back of the little Honda Richie’s rented while they’re in town. He could count all the stars overhead, if he wanted to, and he remembers nights spent lying on Kansas prairie grass, telling each other stupid stories and taking stupid dares they only sometimes followed up on.

Seth looks at the boxes, then at Richie, and then he smiles. “Yeah. Just you and me, right?”

Richie grins. “Right.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

They go on a bit of a spree, after that, hotels and jewelry stores and a bank once, in Tennessee, on their own. Sometimes Vanessa helps them out with surveillance, and he’ll talk to her on the phone for a little while after. It’s good to have people on your side, just in case. Sometimes they have a crew but mostly it’s just the two of them, the eyes and the ears, the head and the hands, one heart between them. In Kentucky Seth shoots a man for putting a gun to his brother’s head. In Saint Louis Richie cracks three safes in a row, in fifteen minutes, just because he can.

Richie will always choose knives, will always choose the cold click of tumblers under his hands over the distant threat of violence a gun gives. Seth knows it’s because he likes to feel the pulse in people’s necks. You can’t miss, Richie tells him once, when you can feel someone breathing. Seth worries about that sometimes, but nothing ever comes of it. So he stops thinking so hard. He enjoys the ride. Laughs into Richie’s neck when he gets too drunk, wakes up to Richie throwing shoes at him until he lurches out of bed, swearing.

They start buying furniture for the house. Chairs and a couch and the best mattresses Richie can find. They’ll sell it when they have to move again. And when they have enough money to retire….

“Where do you want to be in five years?” Seth asks one night, over PBRs, over the new kitchen table. It’s a hand-carved monstrosity Seth saw driving past a garage sale and carted back home in a U-Haul; Richie thinks it’s hideous, and tells him daily.

“On a beach.” Richie levels a finger at Seth’s face. “But not in fucking Florida, okay? California. Or, or Mexico. Lots of Tequila and lots of beautiful women.”

Mexico. He can see it. The two of them on a beach, in the sun, rich and fat and happy. He raises his beer.

“Amen to that, brother.”


End file.
